richard's Sheep Game's Time log

2002-11-09

13:00 AEDT Theme is announced - Construction/Destruction and Sheep

13:50 AEDT Spent quite a lot of time thinking about a workable game idea and finally came up with one. Yay for brainstorming with Rachel :) IDEA: sheep in a field with rock wall. yummy mine-ridden grass on other side of wall. sheep wreck wall to get to grass. farmer must repair wall to save sheep. also included is flocking (sheep flock together, run away from farmer, towards holes in wall)

14:30 AEDT Wow, I've forgotten an awful lot of pygame ;)

15:15 AEDT I have a sheep (alpha channel and all) and a wall section appearing in the field. Yay me :)

16:15 AEDT Now have map "loading" from a string - specifying the field, wall and minefield bits. Sheep are randomly placed in the field bits.

16:34 AEDT Now the map has real corners ;)

16:55 AEDT Just spent 15 mins drawing unnecessary map cells... sigh...

17:10 AEDT Implemented flocking... only all sheep seemed determined to head towards origin. May have missed a 0 somewhere... :)

17:25 AEDT Sheep now try to avoid each other... next is the wall...

18:32 AEDT Player movement implemented. Also got game pause (easier to screenshot ;)

19:00 AEDT Player is scary now and sheep run away from him :)

19:30 AEDT Evil sheep now head for walls ... no destroying yet, but soon, soon :)

20:00 AEDT dinner

21:00 AEDT back to trying to work out the damn collision stuff. maybe I should just try sprites...

22:00 AEDT figure out my collision stuff. still not quite right (the horseshoe map inner walls are passable by _some_ sheep - I'm assuming there's a boundary case I'm not handling)

22:30 AEDT got the sheep destroying the walls and walking out onto the mines, BOOM :)

23:00 AEDT ahah - much better routine for figuring out which cell the sheep is in, and now the wall detection is better and they can always fit through the openings. more splatting!

23:30 AEDT better player placement at start - still got some problems with sheep walking through walls and wanting to go strange places...

24:00 AEDT clipping still stuff, but player has the same clipping now, meaning he can't walk through walls (yay) except when the sheep can (boo) but making it easier for me to find the edge cases letting me go though the walls (yay) - sleep now

2002-12-09

11:00 AEDT breakfast finished, got up to speed with other coders' work.

11:30 AEDT first progress of the day - clipping now much better (uses real width of my "sprites" and checks all corners). Still dodgy though, and I will have to refine it futher I think..

12:00 AEDT got a neat BOOM effect now when sheep blow up :)

13:30 AEDT got fixer player control and imagery, but no detection of nearby wall/field. need food first. - got wall rubble now too

14:30 AEDT yay, player can fix walls now

15:40 AEDT first cut at throw action, the player is hurled across the field

16:00 AEDT sheep throwing implemented! :)

16:09 AEDT oops, can resurrect dead sheep by throwing their gravestone around ;) - can also throw sheep into walls, which is bad...

18:00 AEDT other people have played it, and it didn't stink!!!! yay! - lots of problems with TIFFs and the TTF font too, trying to fix them...

18:20 AEDT help screen

18:50 AEDT player now explodes if he touches mines. - game over screen and opening screen (eerily similar)

20:50 AEDT had dinner, had beer - drew new graphics for the player, now walks and turns and struts :)

23:00 AEDT drawn a new sheep, but having a lot of trouble with it pointing itself in the right direction :(

23:20 AEDT woo, sheep face the right way _and_ the throw command now checks the correct directions! two cleanups in one go!

23:30 AEDT hurm, sheep can get into walls by turning close to them. not sure how to solve that one...

2002-11-11

9:30 AEDT sheep now head for breaks in the walls sometimes

10:15 AEDT got level progression going too, with increasing difficulty

11:30 AEDT better level progression, changes maps and detects the end of the game

11:50 AEDT FIRST "FINAL" SUBMISSION! - now for tweaking ;)

12:59:35 AEDT last tweaked version uploaded (of 6 :)

13:00 AEDT COMPETITION CLOSES, VOTING BEGINS